The conference was riven on several axes. But a powerful programme of women’s rights was adopted, and, as the left at the Women’s Congress had advocated, polygyny was banned, if only symbolically. Against the plans of the powerful Tatar bourgeoisie for extraterritorial cultural–national autonomy, and against pan-Islamic aspirations, the conference advocated a federalist position of cultural autonomy. This could, and indeed would, mature into calls for national liberation.
Similar demands were on the rise. On 13 May, a Kirghiz–Kazakh congress sent greetings and solidarity to the Petrograd Soviet from Semipalatinsk, a province on the border with China with a largely nomadic population. This congress likewise asserted its right to ‘cultural–national self-determination’ and ‘political autonomy’. In Finland, February had energised a push for autonomy, and perhaps more. The government in Petrograd implored the Finns to wait for a Constituent Assembly: they were setting a bad example for other nationalities. In Bessarabia, there was a contest for the souls of Moldovan peasants. The left took on the fractious new Moldovan National Party, whose leaders demanded the ‘broadest autonomy’. Between 18 and 25 May, Kiev hosted the First Ukrainian Military Congress. Over 700 delegates attended, representing nearly a million people, from the fronts, the rear, and the fleets. A voice for national self-determination.
According to the Menshevik journal Rabochaya gazeta, now, post-revolution, ‘the Provisional Government [had] cut itself off completely from imperialist influences’ and was racing towards ‘universal peace’. On 6 May, the Soviet’s Izvestia, though heavy-hearted that Russian soldiers must continue to fight, asserted that they could at least do so ‘with all their energy and courage … in the firm belief that their heroic efforts will not be used for evil … [but] serving one and the same goal – the defence of the revolution from destruction and the earliest possible conclusion of universal peace’.
Alongside such appeals to the war’s new legitimacy, the Coalition Government knew that its international standing, certainly among the Allies, was heavily dependent on whether it was seen to be doing its bit to win the war – and doing so on those Allies’ decidedly unsocialist terms. Some were clear-sighted that this was a contradiction, and, continuing to laud the anti-imperialist necessity of the war’s continuation, they were entirely cynical. Among the many socialists who were not, who were sincere, the mental contortions were unbearable and tragic. And they grew more painful as the government prepared the army for an offensive.
On 11 May, Kerensky published the document ‘On the Rights of Soldiers’. The edict retained much of the content of Order Number 1 – a necessary sop to popular opinion – but, crucially, reinstated the authority of officers at the front. This included the right to appoint and remove lower-ranking officers without recourse to the soldiers’ committees, and the right to use corporal punishment. The Bolsheviks immediately derided this degrading return of traditional hierarchies as the ‘Declaration of the Rightlessness of Soldiers’.
Kerensky was a born performer. He set out to rally troops for a massive push, the offensive for which everyone was braced. It was a quixotic and grotesque campaign.
In the bomb-swept wilds of the front, the ‘persuader-in-chief’, as he was known, called on all his showmanship. He trudged smiling through the shit, mud and blood of battle lines, attired in immaculate quasi-military outfits. He assembled the soldiers, praised them warmly, met their eyes. He pressed a great deal of flesh. Standing on boxes and stumps and the bonnets of battered military cars, he delivered his shrill oratory to the massed troops, demanding sacrifice, working himself up into such a passion that he would sometimes faint.
And in limited fashion, for a limited time, these interventions worked. When Kerensky arrived, soldiers threw flowers. They carried the beaming leader on their shoulders. When he called for them to do so, they hurrahed. One last push, he exhorted the soldiers, would mean peace. At these words, they prayed and wept.
Or some of them did. The testeria of the reception was genuine, but it was neither deep nor lasting. Kerensky sincerely convinced himself that the army was ready and eager for an offensive. It was not. Perspicacious officers, like the thoughtful General Brusilov, with whom Kerensky replaced Alexeev as commander-in-chief on 22 April, knew this.
Besides, Kerensky only orated before certain troops. He was kept away from those where to attempt it would have been to invite injury or worse. Where he did speak, he soon left, and when the brief narcotic of his sermons ebbed, the soldiers were still stuck scant yards from enemy lines, in freezing filth, in the sights of machine guns. His best speeches notwithstanding, at several stops Kerensky was heckled. The rates of desertion remained astounding, the habits of mutiny assertive. Anti-war agitation, Bolshevik and other, did not abate.
The old guard at the army’s top were deeply bitter at the direction of the war and the erosion of old nostrums. On his first day in charge, Brusilov went to greet the staff at Stavka high command. Their ‘frosty feelings’, he said, were palpable. For these stiff and unreconstructed officers, his willingness to work with soldiers’ committees made Brusilov a traitor. He appalled the senior officers with a cack-handed attempt to show his democratic credentials, greeting the privates on arrival, reaching out to shake their hands. The startled men fumbled with their weapons to respond.
Still, irrespective of plunging morale, distrust at the top and desertion at the bottom, the momentum towards an offensive would not slow. No more would counterpressure for rebellion.
The First All-Russian Congress of Peasants’ Soviets took place in Petrograd over almost the entirety of May. Reflecting the overlap between peasantry and soldiery, close to half the 1,200 accredited delegates were from the front.
A sizeable minority of delegates (329) had no affiliation. The majority of the 103 Social Democrats were Mensheviks. The SRs, predictably in this peasant country, dominated, with 537 representatives. Even without an absolute majority, they were able to push through their policy of support for coalition with the Provisional Government, their positions on war and peace and the nationalities question. But it was a reflection of the fractious and hardening mood in the country that such triumphs did not always come easily.
Despite the Bolsheviks’ tiny presence – a minuscule group of nine, accompanied by a caucus of fourteen ‘non-party’ delegates who tended to vote with them – their influence was growing. This was, in particular, because of their harder, more coherent and clearly expressed positions on the two key questions of war and land, as laid out in an open letter from Lenin to the Congress on 7 May.